All About History What If

Who were the gods of the ancients? Some of them are still familiar figures today: the well known gods of Egypt, Greece and Rome have long outlived the worshippers that built their great temples; the gods of Scandinavia have built an unexpectedly lucrative movie career. But what about some of the others? The ancient world was packed with incredible, powerful, and strange deities. They were patrons of all sorts of things, from weather and crops to objects and concepts – if you can think of it, it’s highly likely that somewhere had a god whose job it was to look after it. There were gods whose legends spread from place to place and gods whose worship never left their native lands, although it’s surprising to see quite how many disparate places shared similar ideas about how abstracts like love and war should be represented, and by whom. There are gods whose worship has died out entirely and gods that we still invoke in everyday language. In this bookazine we explore the myths of some of those ancient gods, and their personalities, functions, sacred stories and worship.